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Students who earn degrees in information systems (IS) earn higher starting salaries than fellow business-school counterparts. And they benefit from one of the fastest national placement averages.

These statistics are just some of the findings from the latest edition of the Information Systems Job Index, produced by researchers from Temple University’s Fox School of Business, in partnership with the Association for Information Systems (AIS).

Published and released in January 2018, the third installment of the IS Job Index culled the responses of 2,140 IS graduates of the Class of 2017, from 58 universities nationwide.

Some of the index’s more-interesting findings include:

Salaries for IS undergraduates ($62,820) are the highest among students who pursue typical business majors ($52,047).

The percentage of women in IS jobs (39%) is more than double that of women in other STEM fields like computer science (18%).

Internships double the likelihood of an IS student getting a job offer (39% for those who hold at least one internship vs. 16% for those who do not).

There are more than 3 million IS jobs in the U.S. alone,” said index co-author Dr. Munir Mandviwalla, associate professor of management information systems (MIS) at Temple University’s Fox School of Business. “This data is critical for parents of college-age children, current and prospective students seeking an accurate job outlook, employers, and policymakers—and it cannot be found anywhere else.

Mandviwalla conducted research for the latest installment of the IS Job Index and co-authored it with Dr. Crystal Harold, associate professor of human resource management at Temple’s Fox School of Business, and Maria Boggi, a junior MIS major in the Fox School and Temple University Honor’s programs.

The AIS-Temple Fox School Job Index is the only systematic assessment of the IS job market. It is a joint project, with support from AmerisourceBergen and LiquidHub, to produce reliable national-level data on placement, job type, satisfaction, and related factors like career services, knowledge level, preparedness, and search strategies.

Gordon Burtch (Ph.D., 2013), Assistant Professor of Information and Decision Sciences and Lawrence Fellow, University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management received the 2017 Association for Information Systems – AIS Early Career Award. Gord is one of five recipients worldwide. He also received the 2017 Information Systems Society Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Gord is a Temple MIS alum who was advised by Dr. Sunil Wattal.

Like many entrepreneurs, Peter Hwang’s idea for what he hopes is the next big thing came to him when he spotted a hole in the market’s offerings: while traveling for work in NYC, he couldn’t find a quick way to find a good meal near his location without scrolling through unhelpful restaurant peer review sites.

People are writing a lot of irrelevant information that doesn’t pertain to the restaurant, like ‘After a long day walking around the city with my boyfriend, we were in the mood for X and we finally found this restaurant…’” says Hwang, who graduated from Temple University with a BBA in Management Information Systems in 2016. “It just came to me, ‘Why aren’t we just reviewing the dish?’ In the end, that’s what we care about.”

From that starting point came Bite, a mobile app that allows users to see how others have reviewed individual restaurant dishes using three criteria — Taste, portion size and final thumb’s up/thumb’s down – and a photo of the dish.

The app – described at swipebites.com and available in the Apple App store and Google Play (Search using “bite review.”) — allows users to search by dish if they need to satisfy a specific craving – Pad Thai, pizza or pierogies – or to determine the most highly recommended dish near their location from Center City Philadelphia to NY’s Soho to Southside Chicago.

It’s like a Tinder for food and when you tell people that they get really excited,” Hwang says. “It’s making the process of choosing what to eat more efficient.”

Hwang is just one recent MIS graduate finding a need and filling it with a new business and, in some cases, new technology. Josh Meth, BBA MIS ’14, is working as a project manager at Ridge Spur Media, a company that develops digital strategies for businesses, while developing Auris, a new technology that can differentiate between sounds and act accordingly – i.e., if it detects glass breaking in a closed business, it can call 911 in case a burglary is in progress.

I’ve found my passion in being the middle man between new technology and business,” says Meth, whose company website is www.ridgespurmedia.com. “Auris is a technology that can be used to understand the audio events like the sound of anger or a door closing. Speech recognition was just stage one.”

We’re converting WiFi traffic into foot traffic,” says Oliveira, who initially thought of the business idea while traveling through Europe and finding himself reliant on business’s free WiFi. “Our strength is our ability to empower businesses to connect directly with customers and other businesses in their community…We’re helping the café, restaurant, gym, salon and bar all work together via cross promotion and collaboration.”

All of the entrepreneurs have used their Fox ties to grow their businesses, seeking guidance from former professors and offering internships to Fox students. They’ve also found that the soft skills they picked up while at Fox are just as important as their course work.

At MIS, we did hands-on prototype work in class and learned to solicit feedback to get it to something that people love and like,” Dupell said. “(But) just understanding how to effectively lead a team and be part of a team are skills you develop in college and they’re very beneficial when you’re developing a company.”

The politicians currently determining the future of the American health care system should stop bickering and talk to Dr. Sezgin Ayabakan, Assistant Professor of MIS at Temple University’s Fox School of Business.

Ayabakan and three colleagues recently completed a study on the impact of health information sharing on preventing duplicate lab and radiology testing, perhaps by joining a Hospital Information Exchange (HIE). Addressing this prevalent problem would not only save money, time and effort but would also improve the patient experience.

These tests can cost thousands of dollars. Suppose someone goes into the emergency room and needs an MRI. The patient might have had an MRI a couple of weeks ago but the doctors don’t have access to those images,” Ayabakan says. “We also wanted to see if there was a business value for hospitals to join an HIE.

Ayabakan and co-authors Indrani Bardhan, Zhiqiang (Eric) Zheng and Kirk Kirksey drew their primary data from 68 hospitals in North Texas that that were part of the Dallas Fort Worth Hospital Council. They analyzed 39,600 Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) outpatient patient visits between 2005 – 2012. They found that the number of duplicate radiology tests significantly decreased when hospitals shared data. Also of note was that duplication of radiology tests were reduced 32.8% more than the duplication of labratory tests. They attribute this finding to the differences in data standards implemented in sharing various types of test results.

The complete study will be published in the December 2017 issue of MIS Quarterly. Ayabakan and his research team were the first to look at the issue of duplicate testing and an earlier version of the paper won the best conference paper runner-up award at the 2014 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Auckland, New Zealand. Ayabakan estimates the cost of duplicate radiology tests was about $300 per CHF patient, about $1.12 million in total, and that’s a low estimate as the researchers only looked at patients with CHF.

It was a very conservative approach, he says “We tried to control everything we could in our analysis.”

This study is especially relevant now as health care service costs in the U.S. are twice that of similar services in countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most of the countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia, Japan, Israel, Australia and the U.K. A significant portion of the excessive waste can be pinned on duplicate testing. Ayabakan realizes in the past some hospitals have balked at joining an HIE. Some cite the cost. Others worry about losing patients to other health care providers. There’s also the challenge of establishing universally accepted data standards so all HIE participants use the same coding system. Such a switch could increase a member hospital’s initial investment.

Still, Ayabakan believes these changes are worth the effort. Health care spending currently takes up about 18.6 percent of the GDP. That percentage is expected to grow to 20 percent by 2025.

Promoting HIEs and common interoperability data standards across the spectrum can reduce the extent of duplicate testing and the associated cost to the U.S. healthcare system, he says. This is just one example. The estimates tell us that the total net savings from HIE could reach up to $77.8 billion annually.

Sezgin Ayabakan (Ph.D., University of Texas, Dallas), JaeHwuen Jung (Ph.D., University of Minnesota), and Konstantin Bauman (Ph.D., Moscow State University) join the MIS department as Assistant Professors in fall 2017.

Dr. Ayabakan, who was previously an Assistant Professor at University of Baltimore and faculty fellow at the Schaefer Center for Public Policy, is researching healthcare by applying analytics to analyze very large data sets from hospitals. He will apply his analytics background and practical experience working with big data to teach the MIS department’s award winning GenEd Data Science course.

Dr. Jung, who recently completed his dissertation, is examining the role of incentive structures in online and mobile forums using field experiments. Dr. Jung will apply his industry experience in the telecomm industry as well as research on social gaming and networks to teach Analytics to majors and minors across the Fox School.

Dr. Bauman, who was previously a research scientist at New York University, is a machine learning expert focusing on researching recommendation systems. Dr. Bauman will apply his extensive technical expertise including industry experience as a software engineer to teach programming.

The Fox School of Business is excited to welcome Dr. David Schuff as the new chair of the Department of Management Information Systems (MIS). Since joining the faculty in 2000, Schuff has played a major role in elevating the reputation of the department through his exceptional teaching, research, and leadership.

David’s service to Fox and the MIS department has been invaluable since his arrival nearly two decades ago, said Dr. M. Moshe Porat, Dean of the Fox School. His creation of the Temple Analytics Challenge, for example, demonstrates the value he places on interdisciplinary research and experiential learning activities. I am confident the department will continue flourishing under David’s leadership.

Schuff’s research interests include the application of information visualization to decision support systems, tools for self-service business intelligence, and the impact of user generated content on organizations and society. He has published over 40 journal articles, many in top research publications, such as Management Information Systems Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, and Information & Management.

In addition to teaching in the MIS department, Schuff has taught in the BBA, MBA, and Executive MBA programs at the Fox School’s campuses in Colombia and Japan; and he was the founding academic director of the Executive Doctorate of Business Administration program. His course topics include data analytics and information systems strategy, and he has won numerous awards, including the Musser Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the MIS department’s teaching award. (He won the latter 13 times—more times than any other faculty member.)

Dr. Schuff’s accomplishments as a founding faculty member—and especially his commitment to teaching excellence—make him extremely well qualified to take on this role, said Dr. Munir Mandviwalla, who preceded Schuff as MIS department chair. I am confident he will take the department to even higher levels. It has been a privilege serving the department since its founding in 2000. I look forward to concentrating on leading the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) to further enhance industry engagement.

Schuff’s impressive history with the Fox School gives him a unique ability to lead the MIS department into the future.

I am proud to serve as chair of the MIS department, said Schuff. Together we’ve built an amazing foundation of highly ranked undergraduate and graduate programs with a vibrant faculty of excellent teachers and top-tier researchers. It will be exciting to see where the future takes us as we create new academic programs, explore new areas of boundary-spanning research, and continue to grow as a leading department.

The new Yusuf G. Mandviwalla endowed scholarship fund will provide financial support to undergraduate students majoring in MIS who have both financial need and high academic performance. The $50,000 endowment, which includes a match from the Fox School, was created by Munir and Nazneen Mandviwalla in memory of Munir’s father Yusuf G. Mandviwalla.

According to Dr. Mandviwalla “my father was a successful entrepreneur who believed in providing educational opportunity regardless of background or means, and supported many young people during his lifetime in Pakistan.”

“I am pleased to create this scholarship in his memory to give back to the MIS community,” said Mandviwalla, who is the outgoing chair of the Department of Management Information Systems, which he founded in 2000.

In addition, an anonymous donor has made a generous gift to establish an endowed scholarship which, when fully funded, and matched by the Dean’s special matching gift program, will endow another MIS specific scholarship fund of $60,000.

After years of hard work and study, MIS seniors always have a lot to show off at the Fox School of Business Management Information Systems Capstone Project Showcase. The most recent Showcase, held at the end of April, was no exception: The 17 teams of seniors that gathered to present their final projects unveiled everything from a medical app designed to help doctors track elderly patients’ health regimens to a personalized news aggregation service to an improved search function on Temple’s course database.

The MIS Showcase is a unique opportunity for students to combine all of what they have learned in class with their own entrepreneurial skills, says Fox IT Advisory Board Chairman Bruce Fadem, who oversees the Mentoring program for IBIT. “This year’s teams showcased a wide range of exciting ideas and demonstrated the value of their education with professional business plans and excellent presentations.”

The winning team, selected by a panel of judges, designed an app that tackles the problem of evaluating the maintenance needs of bridges. “On average,” the team notes, “it takes an expert three to six weeks to properly assess a bridge’s structural needs and report these findings to the local government.” Their solution, the app they call Floating Bridges, combines 3D mapping drones, bridge-assessment algorithms and augmented reality to provide local governments with a more efficient, less expensive way to survey and prioritize problem bridges “on a yearly or even monthly basis.”

The team, which included Alexandra Iacovetti, Nicholas Rivera, Bridget Silk and Benjamin Sulaiman, won $500 for coming in first place — though the entire Capstone process has been rewarding in itself, Silk says. “We really benefited from bouncing ideas off each other,” she adds. “It was an awesome experience to end the year with.”

The Capstone projects are often cited by students as one of the highlights of the MIS experience. The opportunity to put so many skills and practices to the test (not to mention the chance to flex their creative muscles) in a competitive setting is both fun and helpful in terms of prepping for life outside of the Fox School.

“The project created an opportunity to fully develop and pitch a real, live platform that addresses a problem,” says Kate Morrison, whose team, District One Sports, created a one-stop digital resource for high school sports stats. “Going through this process end to end created more passion, teamwork and ownership than any other group project I’ve worked on, and it was a beneficial transition from the teaching/learning environment into the professional workplace.”

WorkFit
An application designed to motivate people to make exercise a priority, using social tools, games, geolocation and goal suggestions.
Team: John Kerin, Matthew Leaver, Sara Monahan, Thompson Nguyen
Mentor: Ben Hasan

Social Academic Studying Solution
A web-based solution for connecting students who have similar courses and curriculums, aimed at enabling collaborative studying, as well as helping students manage deadlines and study hours.
Team: Evan Chiao, Kin Lee, Connor Gawlik, Mike Dennis
Mentor: Satbir Bedi

Vulpine Analytics
An analytics tool to help provide employees with information and insights about the connection between their wellness and their productivity, helping them balance health habits with performance at work.
Team: Derek Gibbs, Eric Koeck, Erika Nixon, David Yastremsky
Mentor: Paul Amorello

Newsence
A system for aggregating multiple news sources and customizing them in a fashion that fits into each user’s lifestyle and preferences.
Team: William Agentowicz, Brandan Mackowsky, Eugene Tartaglione, Adama Traore
Mentor: Sukumar Narayanan

Gamer Connect
An application that allows gamers across all platforms (Xbox, Playstation and PC) to find one another and form teams based upon their respective skill levels.
Team: Andrew Fiss, Tyler Urquhart, Elijah Jamison, Kyle Domsohn
Mentor: Shariq Khan

DDesignate
A ride-sharing application in the vein of Uber/Lyft that helps users avoid driving while intoxicated, while providing a way for the user to get his or her car home safely.
Team: Rob Lesnik, Kyle Matusik, Jonathan Plugaru, Casid Sohou
Mentor: Andrew Porter

Course Search
A search function that allows Temple students to look for any class in the Temple database based on keywords/categories that pertain to class topics or subtopics.
Team: Quy Le, Kevin Diem, Darpan Patel, Michael Black
Mentor: Chris Cera